Letting Go

LETTING GO

After feeling driven my whole life

something very near the center has

unwound and I can no longer hurry

through airports or return all my calls.

And sometimes people I barely know

swim up like old worn fish to show me

the map of their gills, and the one long

gash of something they once swallowed,

and how it has cut each breath since.

And I am honored to warm them

like a blanket. But when alone, I

find it hard not to watch

what I swallow.

When alone, these things

I’ve wanted to know since birth

feel so unanswerable, I must

have been torn from them.

I’m sure a hawk doesn’t know it’s a

hawk. I’m sure a spirit doesn’t know

it’s being spiritual. Or a screen door

slapping, like a tired life, in the night,

if it’s opening or closing.

Though we give up the murky fears,

we still can’t know our worth, any-

more than a faceless treasure

can fathom why

it was boxed

or buried

or saved.

A Question to Walk With: Journal about one habit you used to keep that no longer matters to you. How did this change occur?

Sounds True recently published a new, expanded edition of Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness, which gathers twenty-eight years of my writing and teaching about suffering, healing, and wholeness, including thirty-nine new poems and prose pieces not yet published. One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-thirties. This experience unraveled the way I see the world and made me a student of all spiritual paths. With a steadfast belief in our aliveness, I hope what’s in this book will help you meet the transformation that waits in however you’re being forged. Letting Go is an excerpt from the book.